Should a new bird dog specialize in one lead type or bring investors whatever turns up

I'm nine weeks into this and I went wide because I didn't know anything else to do. What I've learned is that wide is exhausting in a way nobody warns you about. Every source has its own quirks, one county wants you in person, another has a portal that times out, a third publishes on paper. I spent most of my time learning systems instead of looking at houses. So I'd vote for the third option on your poll, but I'd shrink the window. Three months of wide was more than I needed to see which two sources were even reachable.

warrant, I buy leads and the thing that makes me answer a bird dog's call twice is consistency of shape, not volume. If I know your leads are always small older houses in the same three zip codes with an owner who's already said something on the phone, I can price my response in thirty seconds. When someone sends me a mixed bag, every lead becomes a new evaluation and I start deprioritizing them.

Still, rigging is right that you can't pick the lane in advance. What I'd do is go wide but write it down properly. Source, date, what happened, whether I'd have paid. Six or eight weeks of that and the lane picks itself. Then narrow hard and tell your investors what you're narrowing to, because the announcement is half the value.

The poll splits on a question that has a measurable answer, so treat it that way rather than as a preference.

A lead channel has three properties you can measure with a spreadsheet and no capital. How many raw records it produces per unit of your time. What fraction of those records reach a conversation. What fraction of conversations an investor accepts. Multiply those and you get accepted leads per hour of work. That is the number the scope decision depends on, and you cannot know it for a channel you have not run.

So the sequencing argument favors going wide first, with a hard cap on how wide. Two or three channels, not seven. Running seven means each one gets too few attempts to distinguish a bad channel from a bad week. Two channels for six weeks gives you a rough comparison, and the comparison is usually not close. Sourcing quality varies enormously by county because access to the underlying records varies by state, and a channel that works well in one market can be unavailable in the next one over.

Where quarry is right is on the selling side. An investor pays for predictability, and predictability comes from repetition in one shape. That argues for narrowing once you have evidence, not for staying wide permanently.

The assumption this rests on is that your time cost is roughly constant across channels. If one channel requires driving and another is desk work, weight the hours by what else you'd do with them. Bird dogging carries no capital requirement, so time is the entire input, and mispricing your own hours is the most common error at this stage.

The thing I keep bumping into is that channel choice isn't only about yield, it's about whether the work is something I'll still be doing in month five. I tried a records-based channel and a driving channel side by side for about a month each. The records one had better numbers on paper and I hated every hour of it. The driving one produced less and I kept doing it, which meant it produced more in the end because I didn't stop.

That probably sounds soft next to rena-expert's accepted-leads-per-hour, but the abandonment rate is part of the math. A channel you quit has a yield of zero.

Voting for the third option. kestrel's point about abandonment is the one that decides it for me, because a plan I stop running is worse than a smaller plan I keep running.

I buy land and hold it, and the bird dogs who reach me are almost never useful, because they're all set up for houses. The one who has been useful for two years does one thing, which is watch for parcels where the tax situation looks like someone stopped caring. He doesn't send me anything else. I don't think he could send me anything else.

That's the case for narrow that nobody has made yet. Narrow doesn't just make you easier to buy from, it puts you in front of a buyer nobody else is talking to. Everyone wide ends up competing for the same house flippers. warrant, if you go wide first, at least point one of your channels at something the crowd isn't looking at.

Numbers on the wide-first case, from watching a bird dog I pay. He ran four sources over about ten weeks and logged everything. Two of them produced nothing I'd pay for across roughly 180 records. One produced 9 leads I looked at and 2 I paid on. The fourth produced 3 leads and both of the ones I paid on came from a single afternoon of him talking to a contractor, which isn't repeatable and shouldn't have been counted as a channel at all.

So his test came back with one real answer out of four attempts, and the answer was obvious once he had it. What I'd flag is that ten weeks and 180 records is thin. He could have gotten unlucky on one of the dead channels and killed something workable. rena-expert's two-channel version with more attempts each is the better design, and orchard's point makes me want one of those two channels aimed somewhere unfashionable.